James Moore - SNAFU - Hunters

“Ooh rah!”

The marines pressed forward through the shattered building. It seemed to have been occupied fairly recently; Blake noted clothing and food that still looked fresh, all caught at the same frozen moment in the midst of the explosion.

He spotted movement out the street and dropped, making his way through the shattered room on his belly.

The main square of the old ghost town was a shattered bramble of broken shards of wood. Every building looked to have burst outward, growing up and away from what must have been the center of the explosion that had turned the buildings around the square into a crown of thorns.

But that was nothing compared to what lay at its centre.

A fused circle of black glass surrounded a central pit that glowed with otherworldly light. It flickered like the reflection of something constantly in motion. Across the surface of the black glass lay a twisted skein of tendrils. So dense were they, it looked like the floor was carpeted with black worms. Each was no thicker than Blake’s thumb, but so long their ends were lost among their tangled brethren.

They spread from the central pit, crawling up the walls of nearby buildings like ivy. Only there, at the farthest perimeter of the writhing mass could the tips of the tendrils be seen waving in the air like the fronds of some unimaginable sea monster. In some places they had fused together into sheets of motile tissue, flat and tough as dry kelp washed up on a beach.

Blake followed them back to the pit. From his vantage point he couldn’t quite see inside – he was glad. What little he could see hinted at something vast moving in the darkness beneath.

Other creatures surrounded the pit, and Blake counted half a dozen of the swift moving creatures – like the one Carroll had killed – as well as two of the big Stryker-killers.

“It’s the portal,” Carroll said in disbelief.

“What?”

“I’ve seen pictures from the tests. High-speed photography at the moment of the explosion. The portal looked like that,” Carroll said, pointing.

“But it’s supposed to be closed,” Blake shouted. “You said it was only open for the instant of the explosion!”

As he said the words, Blake knew the door between worlds was still open because the loss of life here had been much greater than in any mere test. This had been a town once – undocumented and off the maps, and probably the base of some smuggling operation – but still a concentration of life energy. When the bomb had gone off it had allowed something big to gain a foothold in this world. That many-tendriled thing that flowed from the portal like a mass of mating snakes was caught between two worlds, keeping the portal open.

“We need to get out of here,” Carroll said. Pale, his eyes darted left then right, and the man wore every one of his sixty-plus years on his haggard face. This was way more than he had signed up for.

“You hang in there, Marine,” Blake said, but the old man was right. This was more than they could handle. He had no idea what the powers-that-be could do about a portal to another dimension, but that wasn’t his problem. The biggest contribution he could make right now would be to get this information back to the outside world.

Movement out of the corner of his eye.

A creature was crawling up the wall. No bigger than a possum, its many-jointed legs told Blake exactly where it had come from.

“It’s okay,” said Lyons as he drew his knife from the kydex sheath slipped to his chest rig. “I got this one.”

“Wait!” Blake hissed, but it was too late.

Lyons slammed his knife into the creature, pinning it to the wall, but the thing wasn’t about to go quietly. It screeched and thrashed against the blade that pinned it to the wall, smearing black blood against the timbers.

“Fuck!” Lyons shouted. He grabbed the thrashing monstrosity and pulled his knife out ready for another blow, but the creature was too strong. It twisted out of his grip with desperate strength and skittered away out onto the street, still screeching.

“We need to move, now! ” Blake ordered.

There was a heavy thump as something landed on the ceiling above them, then another.

Blake looked up. Half of the shattered room was open to the sky and peering over the lip of the lattice of ruined joists were two of the demons, their cratered faces tracking Lyons and Blake like radar dishes.

“Contact!” Blake shouted and fired up through the boards. No need for subtlety now. This would have to be a fighting retreat.

The hail of bullets should have shredded the timbers, and torn into the creatures above, but Blake had not accounted for the unnatural strength of the stasis-locked structure. His rounds just stopped as if they had hit armored plate, and fell as squashed mushrooms of lead to mingle with the brass of his spent shell casings.

One of the creatures jumped down, slamming into Lyons who still had his knife out. The marine stabbed the creature again and again, but it seemed to have no regard for its own safety. It ignored Lyon’s blows and concentrated on delivering its own. It clawed through his JSLIST, talons snagging on the tough MOLLE webbing of the man’s chest rig.

Blake didn’t dare shoot for fear of hitting his squad mate, and watched in horror as the monster’s mouth opened impossibly wide and closed on Lyons’ head, crushing mask and skull beneath.

Pollin and Blake opened fire at the same time, both knowing their teammate was dead and both wanting to exact revenge on his other-worldly killer.

The second creature landed in the room, but Fernandez was ready for it. He fired at point blank range. Rounds chewed into the creature, but it seemed to be made out of spring steel and Kevlar. Fernandez’ rifle finally clicked down onto an empty chamber, but the creature was still very much alive. It swiped at him, raking clawed appendages across his throat like a quartet of switchblades.

Blake kicked the creature and grabbed Fernandez by the hood of his suit, hauling the marine toward the back of the house. He expected the creature to come leaping back, but although it screeched in fury, no attack came his way. He checked over his shoulder; the creature squirmed in mid-air, clutching at a sliver of timber protruding from its chest. Blake’s kick had impaled the creature on a fragment of the shattered structure like some alien bug in a collection.

He fired one handed, aiming for the sense organ at the centre of the creatures head. It thrashed once then was still.

The ground shook. The mass of writhing tentacles surged from the portal, and hidden in its fronds was another of the creatures. It wriggled free of the tendrils and took its first breath in its new world.

“It’s no good!” Carroll shouted. “You kill one and another just takes its place.”

A zero-sum game . Every scrap of life-energy lost on this side of the portal was immediately replaced from the other side of that bridge between worlds. It was like trying to bail out a boat that was already half sunk – for every bucketful of water emptied over the side, more just flowed in to take its place.

Blake knew what had to be done. There was no point killing the creatures on this side; they would have to cross over. Killing these demons on their home turf would have the opposite effect, sucking life from this world into the next.

Blake grabbed one of the bags they had brought with them from the Stryker. Inside were three half-pound blocks of C4 used for controlled explosions of enemy munitions.

“Get as far away as you can,” he shouted and ran straight toward the pit. He made a mental tally of his remaining ammunition – he was going to raise hell. Those demonic bastards had no idea what was about to hit them.